Immigration (part 2)
to its links with former French colonies, will speak/learn English and the language of their home country. Clearly, as this process continues, the native language of the Quebecois people will die out, breaking all cultural connection with former communities. The Quebec government has thought along similar lines and is morally justified in their ‘right to exclude’ policy. Without it, we would see a decline in the authentic values which define that community. Miller’s argument concludes that denying immigrants entry on any cultural grounds is acceptable, but he overlooks the potential for integration and the recreation of a unifying overall culture after the settling of immigrants. Will Kymlicka, a leading theorist on minority cultural rights, argues for accommodation and integration policies surrounding multiculturalism that aim to protect culture without broad exclusion, arguing that, while a right to exclude ought to be allowed, its use must be limited to certain extreme cases. Measures including allowing dual citizenship, exemption from dress codes, adoption of multiculturalism into school curricula, and the funding of ethnic group organizations to support cultural activities are all part of the Multiculturalism Policy Index, developed by Kymlicka and Keith Banting. 5 Part of this index’s aim is to establish a legal and social framework to justify the inclusion of immigrants into pre-existing culture, rather than adopting a right to exclude policy. Of course, there are many examples of thriving immigrant culture – one only has to look at Britian to see what Yasmin Alibhai-Brown calls the ‘3S’ model of British multiculturalism – saris, samosas, and steeldrums. 6 While even Kymlicka recognizes that the ‘3S’ model can encourage a conception of immigrant groups as hermetically sealed and static, ignoring practices of cultural adaption, he fails to see the flaws with the Multiculturalism Policy Index as a blanket defence against the right to exclude. There is much to celebrate in ethnocultural diversity, but much of this school of multiculturalist thought is rhetoric rather than realism. It presupposes that states have a strong belief in the strength of their borders, and that immigrants are not coming from only one group, which, undeniably, could lead to widespread cultural polarization and the collapse of policy as opposition emerges. Hence, in consideration of culture as a counter to an argument for a right to exclude, we can see that there need always be this safety net in immigration policy, if only to prevent hegemony or animosity from developing, or to preserve the endangered culture of the receiving country. To strike a balance between the definite right to exclude and blanket open borders, cultural rights, international law, and human rights help to define the ideal position and boundary of a state’s duty to immigrants. UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001) establishes cultural diversity as an international value, declaring that you cannot ‘invoke’ culture to infringe upon core human rights. Following this, we have cause for the ‘extreme cases only’ use of a state’s right to exclude – a state cannot morally infringe on human rights as laid out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in denying immigration. A right to exit from one’s current state – one widely recognized in international law – is pointless without a right to entry into some other state, for, if these did not come hand-in-hand, immigrants would have nowhere to go but some stateless land which does not exist. However, a right to exit does not grant an immigrant a right to enter anywhere, merely a right to go somewhere . Take, for example, a militant atheist in State A, one comprised of devout theists. This atheist may be likely to exercise their right to exit because they find the conditions uncongenial, and therefore
5 Kymlicka 2012. 6 Alibhai-Brown (n.d.).
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